News and Excursions

what has been happening around JMSS

Open soccer league at the State Robocup Junior competition

On the 14th of September John Monash entered into the Open soccer league at the State Robocup Junior competition.

Unlike last time you heard from us we moved up a division from Standard league which only uses robots made out of lego to open a soccer league where we built a robot from scratch and needed to use a camera to locate the ball. This adds a lot of complexity to both building and designing the robot as well as programming of the system.

The main computer of the robot was a Raspberry Pi where we installed OpenCV (with much difficulty) to utilise the colour tracking system. After many hours we were able to successfully track a coloured ball. We then began building and designing the robot where we sourced all of the electronic components (motors, fuses, motor drivers, battery and voltage regulator).

The design of the robot was done in Fusion 360, prototyped and printed on an FDM 3D printer. Each robot took about 12 hours to print and once put together we could begin testing the robot.

The competition day consisted of a round robin with matches against all other teams which we won. Teams play multiple games in a round robin format with their two (or one) robot/s to decide the final play off format where there is a semi and grand final to decide the winner of the competition. Making it into the grand finals, we went against MHS (#1 opps) and unfortunately lost by one goal. It was a fantastic day of learning and gaining experience and learning to adapt quickly under pressure, despite the result. Thank you to Mr Chisholm for his support and the school for their encouragement too.

~ Skye Sriratana

Science Olympiads

The Olympiad results are finally in!

A big congratulations to everyone who participated and a special round of applause to the following students who achieved a High Distinction.

Biology: High Distinction

		Year Level
Darren	Liu	10
Nadia	Kober	12
Nicola	Marwick	12
Caleb	Xiao	12

Chemistry: High Distinction

		Year level
Darren	Liu	10
Austin	Molenaar	12
Nicholas	Rowe	12
Anandajeeth	Viraj Adeshwar	12
Declan	Wong	12

Earth Science: High Distinction

Mathew Kemp Year 12

Physics: High Distinction

		Year level
Austin	Molenaar	12
Douglas	Shuttleworth	12
Declan	Wong	12

~ Melanie Denney

It Takes A Spark Conference at the Knox School Wantirna South

On Thursday 24th of October, Lakshanya, Isabel and I attended the It Takes A Spark Conference at the Knox School Wantirna South, as presenters.

It was extraordinarily exciting to see schools from all over Victoria and Tasmania with students from all ages unite under the theme of inspiring problem solvers and critical thinkers in STEAM (Science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics), which was the aim of this conference.

We represented John Monash Science School and presented the ethical implications as well as design thinking about Mental Health AI Chatbots that are arising via technological advancements in our world today, during a problem-solver workshop.

Even with the evacuation cutting our presentation short, the day was a spectacular experience, especially the student panel and guest speakers. I would highly encourage everyone to attend, it was such a wonderful event!

~ Mithuna Karthick, Lakshanya Murali, and Isabel Lau

Young ICT Explorers

Young ICT Explorers is a competition that is designed to encourage students to solve real world problems or showcase their passions using technology. Schools from across Australia and New Zealand compete in this competition every year.

This year two projects from JMSS won prizes in the Victorian division of the competition. Jun Muta, Archie Halliwell and Lennart Leufgens won second prize for fixing up an Osborne 1 suitcase sized portable computer that was released in 1981. They also provided a device to interface with its motherboard that allowed them to use a USB instead of a 5.25" floppy disk.

The other project was Chu Xu's Budget Dog Robot which won third prize. For this project Chu created a lightweight 3D printed quadrupedal robot that is relatively affordable for personal use. The robot uses a Raspberry Pi and can be controlled using a wifi connection. Chu also wrote Python code that allowed the robot to walk and balance on a wobbly platform.

~ David Albrecht

Secondary State Open Chess Finals 2024

The 2024 Secondary State Open Chess Finals took place in October and consisted of 9 rounds throughout the day.

All together 57 schools and 368 skilled chess players were at the tournament. The JMSS chess team consisted of 9 players who had made it to the finals from an earlier qualifying tournament in June. The games were challenging and, in the end, JMSS finished 4th as a school team event.

This is a commendable effort considering that this is the first time that JMSS has participated in the finals. Congratulations to Douglas Shuttleworth who won a bronze medal among Year 12 students in the competition.

It was a successful year for interschool chess at JMSS, thanks to the leadership of the 2024 Chess Club captains (DS and Aaron Baker). We hope to do better next year.

~ Tuan Le

Monash Design Prize

On November 21, 2024, Ms Vida represented JMSS at the 2024 Monash Design Prize Award celebration to see one of our Year 12 students Skye Sriratana win the 2024 Award.

The judges of this award considered all the entries very carefully, and selected Skye’s weightlifting project as the winner based on the thoughtful application of ergonomic design principles. The judges were impressed by her clear, well-articulated “reduction of injury” narrative, alongside the phenomenal application of working technology.

They were inspired to see a fully working prototype in the video Skye produced. Skye fulfilled the challenge to “Design for Good” through caring for the sporting community, many of whom use weights as part of their training regimes. As a weightlifter, to avoid unnecessary back injuries from manually picking up, moving and loading weight plates onto a barbell avoid these injuries, Skye created the Weight Plate Loader, a full-sized working robot prototype, to replace manual handling techniques for loading weight plates.

Congratulations Skye!